How to measure the immeasurable? According to most physicists, our universe consists of 95 percent dark matter and energy, phenomena that cannot be observed, only indirectly traced and described. This paradox serves as a point of departure for a performative inquiry involving a careful staging of tools and techniques for measurement: a sonic diagram, a computer simulation, a video animation. A point of gathering for thinkers and viewers alike, akin to an infinite bonfire in the darkness of space.

Age of the CatalystBenjamin Steininger (researcher and curator, Vienna)

This presentation considers the chemical catalyst’s role in mediating the Anthropocene. Three different temporal regimes compose a triangular relation between the chemical, geological, and human-historical, as new elements are introduced over the course of the 20th century into the Earth’s metabolism, such as fertilizers, fossil fuels, and plastics, significantly impacting the force of the Great Acceleration.

Urban land reclamation for food production requires the development of accessible research tools to help assess soil properties. The network HacKIDemia develops DIY soil sensors to enable communities to plan and plant civic gardens and at the same time analyze and monitor potential sites for growing consumable plants. This demonstrationconsists of a collaborative assembly process, applied research, and a public proposition in the form of a group report, a detailed park-to-garden proposal.

Using the materials and instruments employed in funerary rites in late 22nd century Martian settlements, this demonstration addresses how Mangalayana (“Mars vehicle”) Buddhism radically transformed conventional understandings of the relationship between matter and time, planets and space, the finite and the infinite, and moratlity and immortality. This imagined future is set within a context of a revolution in consciousness, through which human society, the evolution of the Earth, and our wider astral environment are entangled.

The invention ofX-rays in 1896 initiated public excitement about the possibility of visually recording the inside of the skull. Would it be possible to take an image of an active brain to capture thought altogether? This demonstrationaddresses experiments in animation and some of those “failed” machines, scientificartistic hybrids that generated new visions of interiority, from a Berlin laboratory to a bathtub in Munich.

We are used to perceiving dust as a nuisance. In science, how ever, these miniscule particles carried by the air are used consistently to model reality, generating cosmological figurations not based on order, but rather contingency. This lecture performance assesses the cosmogenic processes that inform our sense of reality and its creative emergence, taking the “smallest entities” that hover amongst us into a deeper consideration.

This demonstrationexamines the analogy of macrocosm/microcosm and how this has historically been used to model the heavens, as well as the earth’s weather cycles, in relation to the human mind and body. Inviting historian Andrew Gregory to address how sympathy and harmony have been employed to mediate the relations between the macro and the micro, this demonstrationcontextualizes these arguments and approaches its applications. An ongoing set of imaginations between philosophy and astronomy, cosmology and medicine, with various historical figures from Aristotle to Giordano Bruno to William Harvey act as interlocutors.

Tracing the stories that animate and are animated by an “object” and its global performance, the collision of a standard hand luggage trolley and a plastic water bottle gives voice to the polyvalent utterances of capital. The crushing sound of plastic expands into ever-changing rhythmic patterns as it reverberates and resounds in the space. Two objects, a sound installation, and a presentation of footnotes from the objects’ travelogue trace the appearances of the water we drink, the ways we move between places, and the means whereby we commune with things en route.

From Oct 16 to 18 at Audi Foyer and Terrace: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, de paso (2011-ongoing), sound installation involving a trolley bag and a plastic water bottle, accompanied by a demonstration on Oct 17 at 7:30pm in Auditorium

Exploring the elegance of the flowing line as it applies to the movements of a body, this demonstration exercises principles of flexibility and economy inherent in the human physical apparatus’ capacity for swinging motions. With the aim to experiment and explore possible ranges of movement, a combination of physical methods, observational commentary, and drawing instruments will translate the scale and sense of corporeal lines in motion.

From the perspective of cultural history, the exhibition format can be seen as a highly flexible, individualized, and in this sense, very modern ritual. As such, its basis lies upon the principle of separation, from which an object is removed from its network of connections, and through which the senses, and the capacity for perception and recognition, are partitioned amongst the exhibition goer. This demonstration considers the social, political, and economic implications such separation affords.

Glass(at the Tea Garden, entrance through Cloakroom Foyer)Allen S. Weiss (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University)

Considering the evolution of material, form, and function in Japanese drinking vessels, this demonstrationexamines how the transmogrification of earth (mud) into artisanal ceramic objects, traditionally made of clay, maintains traces of both earthly matter and embodied touch, such that imperfections are of the essence. To confront the materiality of a cup, be it plastic, glass, or clay, is to unravel modalities of social relations, contradictory aesthetic forms, and urgent imperatives towards an ecological consciousness.